One Piece - Season Two: Second Voyage DVDReview

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Pirates versus dinosaurs; a hard combination to beat.

By D. F. Smith

Sometimes, a dozen episodes isn't quite enough to get to the end of any given One Piece storyline. In the case of this box set, however, it's almost exactly right. The series' ongoing Alabasta arc has just gotten started, but at least the first leg comes to a satisfying conclusion here.

When we left off at the end of the first second season box set, Monkey D. Luffy and Zoro decide not to kill each other after all – if only because they've both got bigger problems to deal with. Vivi, supposedly the crown princess of Alabasta, needs someone to safeguard her back to her homeland and deal with a violent rebellion once she gets there. It seems like a simple enough job, except the rebellion has decided to reach out and do away with Vivi before she makes it back home.

In other words, it's going to be a while before our heroes even make it anywhere near Alabasta. This box set covers their first major side trip, wherein they land on a distant "Lost World" sort of island. There, it's a three-cornered battle between the Luffy Pirates, the assassins sent back from Alabasta by Baroque Works and a couple of dim-witted but well-meaning giants who would just as soon have not been interrupted from their quiet life of drinking, fighting, more drinking, more fighting and hunting for dinosaur meat.

It's essentially an eight-episode-long fight scene. With so many characters involved, though, it breaks down into a couple of different brawls going on at once, which makes for a little less monotony than in some of the battles from earlier in the series. The bad guys in this round have some interesting gimmicks, too – Mr. 3's animated wax statues lend themselves to a couple of cool twists and turns – and a jungle full of grazing dinosaurs makes for a great backdrop.

To balance out the long, drawn-out slugfest with the giants, there's a fun two-part story to open up the set, bringing back a couple of minor characters from the very beginning of the series. Coby and Helmeppo, the two would-be marines who ran into Luffy on his first adventure, have gone and joined the Navy, and it's not exactly all that they'd dreamed it would be.

Long-time fans should be pretty psyched to pick up a proper uncut version of this storyline. The old 4Kids edition of One Piece chopped up or tossed out about 90 percent of these episodes – not one of them, in fact, was shown anywhere near intact. (Episodes 67 and 77 were apparently cut together into a single American TV episode. If you can figure out how that was supposed to work, we'd love to know.) It's more of a long side-trip than an actual step forward for the series – that'll have to wait for the next box set, when we meet the inimitable Tony Tony Chopper – but One Piece doesn't have to go forward to go somewhere fun.